Elsien's Traveblogue

Climbed up Montmartre in the rain. It's always picturesque, even when wet or maybe especially when wet and the added advantage is that all the tourists go to the Louvre. There weren't many, not even at the Place du Tertre, a few Japanese people, mainly. One of them stared fixedly at the very ugly watertower and asked me “Mea Culpa ...” (Is that how they are taught to say 'Excuse me' now?), then pointed on his map of Paris to the Sacre Coeur. “No, Sir, this is the water tower. Look behind it, yes, just there, that's the Sacre Coeur... That way, you can't miss it!”
I went to the Musee de Montmartre, because it's the old house and studio of Utrillo and his mother Suzanne Valadon. There are a lot of pictures and posters of other Montmartre artists, but to me the main attraction was Valadon.
Suzanne Valadon was an illegitimate child, born somewhere in rural France. She became a model for some of the Montmartre painters: Degas, Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec, and had herself an illegitimate child, who later became the painter Utrillo. She was the lover of Eric Satie who, according to the plaque, had a house next to hers. Most amazingly, she became a painter herself, and a really good one too! I love her work, it's very colourful, full of strong women, many nudes. She used herself as a model for some of her best paintings and she put the sexist art world on its head by painting a circle of sexy, naked men in a painting called 'Casting the Net'.
There wasn't much of her in the house. You can see the large windows of her studio, but not go in. There was a 40-minute film about her son, Utrillo, an alcoholic who painted all those rather sweet pictures of places in Montmartre and other locations in Paris and France. The painters at the Place du Tertre seem to have modelled themselves on him. He's not at all my cup of tea, but reproductions of his paintings are immensely popular with tourists.